In case of a swine flu pandemic the French government has a plan
to introduce emergency measures that would gut legal protections
for citizens, the daily Liberation reported.

According to documents provided to the daily by a judges
union, the plan would extend the period police can keep a suspect
in detention without charge or a hearing before a judge to up
to six months.

Suspects would also not be able to contact a lawyer until after
spending 24 hours in custody.

Under the plan children could be tried in adult courts and more
trials held behind closed doors.

[A report by the] Syndicat de la Magistrature called the measures
revolting and said they would amount to liberticide,
and called on Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie to abandon
the plan.

The union was due to release the text of the government plan,
which it said was provided to heads of courts in great secrecy
in July, the newspaper reported.

Swine flu, or the A(H1N1) virus, the first pandemic to be declared
by the World Health Organization in this century, has so far claimed
15 lives in France, out of at least 2,837 worldwide.

The French government has conducted extensive planning to prepare
for an expected new wave of infections as the autumn flu season
approaches in the northern hemisphere.

The union of judges and lawyers in France has written a letter
of protest to the French Justice Minister over plans to strip
people of their civil liberties during the swine flu pandemic,
which were made in the greatest secrecy.

The lawyers union has fiercely criticised the decree which
would dismantle the civic rights of the people of France in the
name of a pandemic emergency and which was issued without any
democratic debate.

Emmanuelle Perreux, president of the judges union said
that it was unacceptable for the government to remove
peoples fundamental liberties by secret decree on the pretext
of a pandemic emergency.

She said that she hoped that parliament would intervene after
the revelation that the French Minister of Justice Michele Alliot-Marie
had circulated orders in secret in July instructign judges to
allow children to be put on trial in adult courts and detentions
without any court order in the name of a pandemic emergency.

Alliot-Marie denied that there was any secret plan
and claimed the secret orders were a provisional working document
as outrage in France over the secret vaccination and detention
plans that are now attracting widespread coverage in the mainstream
media mounts.